Related papers: Structural Stability of a Lightsail for Laser-Driv…
The stability of a light sail riding on a laser beam is analyzed both analytically and numerically. Conical sails on Gaussian beams, which have been studied in the past, are shown to be unstable without active control or additional…
Lightsails are promising spacecraft that can traverse interstellar distances within decades via radiation-pressure propulsion from high-power lasers. The envisioned missions crucially rely on the sail being confined within the propelling…
Lightsail spacecraft, propelled to relativistic velocities via photon pressure using high power density laser radiation, offer a potentially new route to space exploration within and beyond the solar system, extending to interstellar…
The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative is suggested to develop the concept of propelling a nano-scale spacecraft by the radiation pressure of an intense laser beam. If such a nanocraft could be accelerated to 20 percent of light speed, it…
Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…
Exploring and traveling to distant stars has long fascinated humanity but has been limited due to the vast distances. The Breakthrough Starshot Program aims at eliminating this limitation by traveling to Alpha Centauri, which is 4.37…
Spatial linear instability analysis is employed to investigate the instability of a viscoelastic liquid jet in a co-flowing gas stream. The theoretical model incorporates a non-uniform axial base profile represented by a hyperbolic tangent,…
Flow of a thin viscous film down a flat inclined plane becomes unstable to long wave interfacial fluctuations when the Reynolds number based on the mean film thickness becomes larger than a critical value (this value decreases as the angle…
We present a numerical simulation of the response of an expanding relativistic jet to the ejection of a superluminal component. The simulation has been performed with a relativistic time-dependent hydrodynamical code from which simulated…
Acceleration of ultrathin plasma foils by laser radiation pressure promises compact alternatives to the conventional ion accelerators. It was shown, that a major showstopper for such schemes is a strong transverse instability, which…
Light can exert forces on objects, promising to propel a meter-scale lightsail to near the speed of light. The key to address many challenges in such an ambition hinges on the nanostructuring of lightsails to tailor their optical scattering…
Using a combination of theory, experiments, and numerical simulations, we investigate the stability of coherent structures in a suspension of strongly aligned active swimmers. We show that a dilute jet of pullers undergoes a pearling…
We derive a theoretical model for the Rayleigh-Taylor (RT)-like instability for a thin foil accelerated by an intense laser, taking into account finite wavelength effects in the laser wave field. The latter leads to the diffraction of the…
The linear stability of stratified two-phase flows in rectangular ducts is studied numerically. The linear stability analysis takes into account all possible infinitesimal three-dimensional disturbances and is carried out by solution of the…
Laser propulsion has been proposed for relativistic interstellar flights, but it faces the significant challenge of requiring extremely powerful laser radiation due to the inherently low momentum transfer between the beam and the sail. The…
Recently, the existence of robust three-dimensional light bullets (LBs) was predicted theoretically in the output of a laser coupled to a distant saturable absorber. In this manuscript, we analyze the stability and the range of existence of…
Linear and weakly nonlinear stability analyses of an externally shear-imposed, gravity-driven falling film over a uniformly heated wavy substrate are studied. The longwave asymptotic expansion technique is utilized to formulate a single…
This study presents a detailed investigation of the modulational stability of interfacial wave packets in a two-layer inviscid incompressible fluid with finite layer thicknesses and interfacial surface tension. The stability analysis is…
A new element is proposed to play a role in the evolution of extrasolar planetary systems: the tidal (or elliptical) instability. It comes from a parametric resonance and takes place in any rotating fluid whose streamlines are (even…
Interstellar objects (ISOs) motivate a coupled mission-design and inference question relevant to spacecraft dynamics and control in extreme environments: if volatile-rich, rotating comet-like bodies were used for sustained deep-space…